“He commuted to his Canadian office in a Ferrari, though sometimes snowy conditions forced him to use Bentley.”

“Café Flore is packed, shimmering, every table filled. Bentley notices this with a grim satisfaction but Bentley feels lost. He’s still haunted by the movie Grease and obsessed with legs that he always felt were too skinny though no one else did and it never hampered his modeling career and he’s still not over a boy he met at a Styx concert in 1979 in a stadium somewhere in the Midwest, outside a town he has not been back to since he left it at eighteen, and that boy’s name was Cal, who pretended to be straight even though he initially fell for Bentley’s looks but Cal knew Bentley was emotionally crippled and the fact that Bentley didn’t believe in heaven didn’t make him more endearing so Cal drifted off and inevitably became head of programming at HBO for a year or two. Bentley sits down, already miked, and lights a cigarette. Next to them Japanese tourists study maps, occasionally snap photos. This is the establishing shot.”

“When people make a contract with the devil and give him an air-conditioned office to work in, he doesn't go back home easily.”

“An ambassador is a person who having failed to secure an office from the people is given an office by the Administration on condition that he leave the country.”

“He's a Canadian. I've not much more to say about him." "Isn't he a tall, fit, strapping fellow? A handsome guy, a good-looker with fair hair down to his shoulders?" "Yes," Camille said wairly. "How do you know that as well." "All Canadians are like that. Isn't that so?”

“Three times a day Petrovich showed up at the nurse’s office for his injections, always using the hypodermic needle himself like the most craven of junkies, though after shooting up he would play the concert piano in the auditorium with astounding artistry, as though insulin were the elixir of genius.”